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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Neon week-psychedelic Hello Kitty

I'm concluding neon week a little late, but with one of my favorites-Hello Kitty! I liked Hello Kitty as a kid, and as a teacher's aide, I still see her a lot. The adorable feline is as lovable as ever, all these years later! I wanted to do a neon look that's as cheerful as she is, so this is what I came up with. Find out what colors I used and what problem I encountered doing this mani, after the jump!

Hello Kitty manicure using neon colors

Most of the neons I used in this manicure come from the Color Club Starry Temptress collection. They are:

The problem I encountered when doing this mani can be summed up in one word: stamping! I'm no expert when it comes to stamping anyways, but the Hello Kitty stamp proved to be especially problematic for me. In the first place, the stamp is fairly wide and I have narrow nails. The whole image of HK won't fit into my nail if I stamp it vertically, I have to stamp diagonally to squeeze her in. The other problem was actually getting the image onto the stamper. I used the stamper from the Salon Express kit to stamp, which I think is part of the problem. I prefer the Born Pretty stamper to the Salon Express one. Also, I wonder if the Hello Kitty plate is etched well. I feel like it was a real struggle to get the image onto the stamper way too often, so much so that maybe the image is not etched deeply enough into the metal plate as it should be. Maybe it's just the stamper, or maybe just my plate is bad. All I can tell you is that it took me over an hour to get a HK image I was happy with onto my nail. Even the image I got is a bit cut off.

Hello Kitty manicure, shade

Once I finally had Hello Kitty positioned well on my nail, it was easy to create this manicure. I started with 2 coats of white. I used pieces of a makeup sponge to add the green, blue, pink and yellow polishes to my nails, positioning them randomly for each nail. For the Hello Kitty image, I used a the small side of a dotting tool to make a neon yellow dot for her nose. I used the larger side of the same dotting tool to make the two sides of the neon pink bow. I connected them with a smaller dot in the center of the bow. Finally, I ripped up my wedge-shaped makeup sponge into tiny pieces and sponged very carefully around the Hello Kitty image. I used the corners of the sponge pieces to have more control of the polish. I'm sure you could also use tweezers to hold a sponge with a lot of precision, as well.

I freakin' love how this manicure turned out! It's one of my favorites ever! The perfectionist in me wishes the stamp had been complete, but, oh, well. The overall look is just so cheerful and fun, and it's always great to see Hello Kitty in a manicure. <3<3<3 I hope you guys like it as well. :)